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Frankenstein Mary Shelley
Chapter
24 & Walton, in Continuation
Summary: Chapter 24
His whole family destroyed, Victor decides to leave Geneva
and the painful memories it holds behind him forever. He tracks
the monster for months, guided by slight clues, messages, and hints
that the monster leaves for him. Angered by these taunts, Victor
continues his pursuit into the ice and snow of the North. There
he meets Walton and tells his story. He entreats Walton to continue
his search for vengeance after he is dead.
Summary: Walton, in Continuation
I, the miserable and the abandoned, am
an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on.
Walton then regains control of the narrative, continuing
the story in the form of further letters to his sister. He tells
her that he believes in the truth of Victor's story. He laments
that he did not know Victor, who remains on the brink of death,
in better days.
One morning, Walton's crewmen enter his cabin and beg
him to promise that they will return to England if they break out
of the ice in which they have been trapped ever since the night
they first saw the monster's sledge. Victor speaks up, however,
and convinces the men that the glory and honor of their quest should
be enough motivation for them to continue toward their goal. They
are momentarily moved, but two days later they again entreat Walton,
who consents to the plan of return.
Just before the ship is set to head back to England, Victor
dies. Several days later, Walton hears a strange sound coming from
the room in which Victor's body lies. Investigating the noise, Walton
is startled to find the monster, as hideous as Victor had described, weeping
over his dead creator's body. The monster begins to tell him of
all his sufferings. He says that he deeply regrets having become
an instrument of evil and that, with his creator dead, he is ready
to die. He leaves the ship and departs into the darkness.
Analysis: Chapter 24 & Walton, in Continuation
By this point in the novel, Victor has assumed the very
inhumanity of which he accuses the monster. Just as the monster
earlier haunts Victor, seeking revenge on him for having destroyed
any possibility of a mate for him, Victor now experiences an obsessive
need to exact revenge on the monster for murdering his loved ones.
Like the monster, he finds himself utterly alone in the world, with
nothing but hatred of his nemesis to -sustain him.
Echoes of the monster's earlier statements now appear
in Victor's speech, illustrating the extent to which Victor has
become dehumanized. “I was cursed by some devil,” he cries, “and
carried about with me my eternal hell.” This is the second allusion
to the passage in Paradise Lost in which Satan, cast out from Heaven,
says that he himself is Hell. The first allusion, made by the monster
after being repulsed by the cottagers, is nearly identical: “I,
like the arch fiend, bore a hell within me.” Driven by their hatred,
the two monsters—Victor and his creation—move farther and farther
away from human society and sanity.
The final section of the novel, in which Walton continues
the story, completes the framing narrative. Walton's perception
of Victor as a great, noble man ruined by the events described in
the story adds to the tragic conclusion of the novel. The technique
of framing narratives within narratives not only allows the reader
to hear the voices of all of the main characters, but also provides
multiple views of the central characters. Walton sees Frankenstein
as a noble, tragic figure; Frankenstein sees himself as an overly
proud and overly ambitious victim of fate; the monster sees Frankenstein
as a reckless creator, too self-centered to care for his creation.
Similarly, while Walton and Frankenstein deem the monster
a malevolent, insensitive brute, the monster casts himself as a
martyred classical hero: “I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly
and exult in the agony of the torturing flames,” he says. Fittingly,
the last few pages of the novel are taken up with the monster's
own words as he attempts to gain self-definition before leaving
for the northern ice to die. That the monster reassumes control
of the narrative from Walton ensures that, after Victor's death
and even after his own, the struggle to understand who or what the
monster really is—Adam or Satan, tragic victim or arch-villain—will
go on.
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